What it is: A historical saga about two orphaned sisters, trained as seamstresses, whose lives diverge and converge in dangerous ways during their early adulthood Brazil in the 1930s. Emília marries into high society in Recife and opens a dress shop that thrives on the patronage of the prominent friends of her in-laws. Luzia lives among bandits after being abducted at an early age by cangaceiros, roving groups of men and women who for centuries plundered and protected the countryside of northeastern Brazil.

How much I read: The first 50 and the last 75 pages, about a quarter of the book.

What I stopped reading: This novel resembles a cross between a Brazilian Bonnie and Clyde and a Dominick Dunne novel. Like Dunne, Frances de Pontes Peebles has a strong sense of pace, uses her research well and maps the intersection of sex, crime and social status. She also weaves into her plot an appealing sewing motif, showing how rewarding and arduous dressmaking could be when Singer’s hand-cranked machines were giving way to electric ones. In The Seamstress the tape measure is a metaphor for truth or trustworthiness, the ability to give a straight account. But for all her painstaking attention to detail, de Pontes Peebles draws her characters broadly. She tells us that people called young Luzia “the yolk” and Emília “the white,” and the sisters have that yolk-and-white quality in the novel. Interesting as some of the material was, the book didn’t have enough depth to hold my attention for more than 600 pages.

Best line in what I read: “Beneath her bed, Aunt Sofia kept a wooden box that held her husband’s bones.”

Worst line in what I read: Would a Brazilian woman living in 1928 have used the phrase “state-of-the-art” (as in “a state-of-the-art machine: a pedal-operated Singer”)?

Raquel Pacheco writes about as well as Henry James would have run a brothel. This isn’t surprising given that she was a high school dropout and unknown teenage prostitute in Brazil until she started blogging about her clients’ sexual performance.

Then all hell broke loose – hell being, in this case, a book contract, a movie deal and write-ups in newspapers like the New York Times. But the prose doesn’t exactly sizzle in this memoir of her several years as a prostitute who used the name Bruna Surfistinha (“Bruna the Little Surfer Girl”). (Writing sample: “Yay! Finally someone invited me to a swingers’ club!!!”) Pacheco, now in her early 20s. says she quit prostitution just before her 21st birthday. And her memoir reads the way your high school diary might if you’d had much more sex and kept score in Portuguese, then had your words translated it into British English, so that people kept asking you questions like, “How ’bout a wank?”

Pacheco intersperses tales of turning tricks with details of her well-off but troubled childhood, marked by bulimia, truancy and shoplifting. Partly for this reason, her book isn’t sexy enough to be erotica or single-minded enough to be pornography. Nor does it have much to offer in the way of advice. A brief section of sex tips tells you little more women’s magazines do. (Try different rooms, like the kitchen.) And the advice seems pitched to people decades behind Americans in their views on sex. “Some people think sex should be like in porn films: the guy wildly banging the girl as if he were drilling through asphalt,” she writes. Don’t they get reruns of Sex and the City in Brazil and know how mercilessly that show would have lampooned those people?

Best line: “Love is blind, deaf and mindless. But mute, never.

Worst line (tie):No. 1: “In almost three years in this business, by my count, I think I’ve had sex with more than 1,000 men. In theory it might not sound like a lot …” No. 2: “I’m a Spiritualist, because I believe that on the ‘other side’ there is everything we have here. Even hospitals.”

Caveat lector: This review was based on an advance reading copy. Some material in the finished book may differ.

Published: February 2007 (first American edition). June 2007 (paperback edition).

“SAO PAOLO. She goes by the name Bruna, the Little Surfer Girl, and gives new meaning to the phrase ‘kiss and tell.’ First in a blog that quickly became the country’s most popular and now in a best-selling memoir, she has titillated Brazilians and become a national celebrity with her graphic, day-by-day accounts of life as a call girl here.

“But it is not just her canny use of the Internet that has made Bruna, whose real name is Raquel Pacheco, a cultural phenomenon … “

Larry Rohter in “She Who Controls Her Body Can Upset Her Countrymen,” the New York Times, April 27, 2006.

A review of the American edition of Pacheco’s memoir, The Scorpion’s Sweet Venom, will appear tomorrow on One-Minute Book Review.

What! You want another review of one of those high-toned winners of the Pulitzer or Booker Prize or the Caldecott Medal? I haven’t reviewed enough of those for you? Have you forgotten that call girls, too, have an honored place in literature?

No, I’m not talking about the memoirs of the Mayflower Madam. I’m talking about Holly Golightly, a call girl in Truman Capote’s novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s (though you wouldn’t know it from the movie we all love, anyway). So within the next week I’m reviewing The Scorpion’s Sweet Venom: The Diary of a Brazilian Call Girl (Bloomsbury, $14.95), just out in paperback. This memoir grew out of the online diary of former teenage prostitute Rachel Pacheco, who used the stage name of Bruna Surfistinha (“Bruna the Surfer Girl”). The publisher calls this book “an international sensation” by “the Paris Hilton of Brazil.” (Now there’s a recommendation! What will the publishing industry give us next, the memoirs of the Lindsay Lohan of Uruguay?) I believe I have a duty to review this book because when you actually go to Bruna’s famous blog and try to see what the fuss is all about … it’s in Portuguese! I ask you: What good does that do American teenage boys? So check back if you can’t live without knowing more about this one. And — who knows? — if the publishing industry does give us the memoirs of the Lindsay Lohan of Uruguay, I might review that, too, if I decide that you and I need a break from all those prize-winning authors like Ian McEwanwww.oneminutebookreviews.wordpress.com/2007/08/10/.